In modern business computing environments such as desktop computing, a user will have a display device attached to a computer. The computer will run an operating system that will interact with display hardware and software components to control the output of the display device. Many different display devices with different hardware and software capabilities are in existence. There are many different sizes of display devices with different usable display areas. The computer, usually through a graphics processing unit (also called a graphics card) will adapt the display data to suit the size of the display device. However, in many situations data will be accessed for display that has not been created with the specific end display parameters in mind. For example, when a computer is running a web browser and a user is accessing data from a website, the data will be sent to the computer without any knowledge of the size of the usable display area.
When presenting long lists of items to end users pagination controls are often used to prevent the need to vertically scroll the window. These pagination controls split list of, for example, one hundred items into blocks of ten and then display a single page at a time, allowing the user to click a control to move between the pages. However, difficulties arise if some items occupy more vertical space (pixels) then other items. To achieve the goal of preventing vertical scrolling, the pagination control must dynamically change the number of items displayed on a single page to allow larger items to fit in the window. For a thick client application this is a simple affair as the sizes can be calculated before the items are displayed. For a thin client, for example, running in a web browser without any proprietary plug-ins this is not easy as the sizes of the items will not be known before they are rendered.
US patent application 2009/0089668 (Magnani, J. A. et al. “System and method of automatically sizing and adapting a widget to available space”, Apr. 2, 2009) discloses a smart-sizing, browser-based widget using both information provided by the web browser and webpage, within which it is being displayed, to calculate, in real-time, which if its elements to display, and at what scale, so as to make the most of efficient use of its available space.
It is therefore an object of the invention to improve upon the known art.